Zeynep
Share Article Escaping an insane world Zeynep enjoyed a long sauna. She scrubbed off dead cells.
She walked into a spacious white marble room with a high vaulted dome and thermal pool as 32-points of sunlight shafted across blue mosaic tiles and eight recessed ochre cubicles where women soaped, slathered, scrubbed, melted and relaxed in thick mist heat.
They were divorced from anxieties, fears, husbands, lovers, kids, tedious housework, tomatoes and brown tea. Natural mineral water was a simple luxury of musical respite. Zeynep savored an extensive massage. A muscular woman worked sandpaper fibers over her skin.
Zeynep dove into unconscious thermal waters. Renewed, she enjoyed fresh squeezed orange juice and meditating in spring air below snow covered mountains and blue sky, I’ve defrosted my imagination.
She sat on a stone wall seeing a brown valley, plains and distant rolling green hills where lights on cooling towers at a nuclear reactor blinked red. She discerned movement inside a sloping field of yellow wild flowers and tall spring grass. Animal alert.
Working its way through and down was something large. A cat perhaps a snake. A large green brown turtle waddled into view. Splendid. Carrying the world on its hard shell back with a hexagram, it covered terrain headed for green.
A rusty wire fence enclosed its universe. It turned away from dreaming and exploring, its instinct directed it toward green, around trees, through forests brimming with life, soil, smells and textures foraging forward in paradise. Turtle memory.
The hexagram on its back was clear. You will travel far. Slow is natural. You will live long.
It was uncanny how Z discovered one word in a poem about an orchid feeling loss, rectifying it’s beautiful existence in white light and black shadow.
Possessing consciousness, Orchid was imprisoned and comforted by charcoal. Blooming free it released scents rendering humans comatose with pleasure.
Zeynep stood on a Metro platform. When it arrived neurotic impatient passengers rushed glass doors like hungry tigers attacking their brother’s keeper with hormone free meat ... They believed by rushing the door it would spring open quickly ...
They were stymied in their desire, their quest for immediate gratification arriving on steel, an air conditioned nightmare of lightning bolts as they pressed relatives and strangers against glass trapped & staring at shimmering reflections of their grimacing faces.
Word Factory doors opened.
Today is a good day to be happy & empty.
Practice emptiness and non-attachment, whispered Leo, a Tibetan monk.
Not too detached and not too sentimental, said Zeynep, his telepathic artist friend in her Bursa restaurant drawing stick figures with wild forested hair living in paper mâché houses beneath a startled sun in a well-thumbed black Moleskine as ravenous shopaholic eaters crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat and rice mixed with gaseous beans. They stuffed food into bland faces while texting erotic pornographic messages to lovers.
To eat is to love.
Food sex shelter air water are essentials. It’s the Middle Way, said Z.
Leo was grateful to meet Zeynep. She renewed his faith and trust in art, friendship, free play and creativity without expectations, outcomes or ego with clear childlike curiosity. Expectations and reality are illusions.
A Lao monk wrapped in orange robes danced in cool dust before morning alms.